Big Ag Mired in Academic Ghostwriting Controversy

The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s ScienceInsider Magazine reports on a New York medical school faculty member mired in controversy over a paper on glyphosate that featured his byline but was allegedly partially ghostwritten by Monsanto officials.

Highlights:

* “Officials at the New York Medical College (NYMC) in Valhalla, New York, had not heard of the ghostwriting allegation until they were contacted by ScienceInsider, says Jennifer Riekert, the college’s vice president of communications. “Now that we’re aware of this, we’re going to have to obtain the materials involved and learn all we can about this situation,” she says.”

* “The lead author on the paper is Gary Williams, a pathologist at NYMC. His last name appears briefly in documents unsealed last week as part of a lawsuit against Monsanto by people alleging they developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from exposure to Roundup and its primary ingredient, glyphosate.”

* “The documents, including internal emails written in 2015, reveal Monsanto executives strategizing about ways to work with academic and independent scientists to get out the company’s message that glyphosate poses no risk of cancer. And they include suggestions that company officials “ghost write” portions of scientific papers to be submitted to peer-reviewed technical journals.”

* “Claiming authorship for work done by others is considered to be a serious ethical breach in the research community, as is not disclosing potential conflicts of interest.”

* “The science around the chemical remains unsettled. Though IARC has raised concerns, a number of regulatory agencies have declared they see no evidence that glyphosate causes cancer. The European Chemicals Agency declared last week that the chemical should not be classified as a carcinogen.”

* “Monsanto officials had learned in advance of IARC’s 2015 decision, and considered responses aimed at quickly pushing back against the agency’s findings, according to emails among company executives. Several options involved seeking to publish papers in scientific journals buttressing the company’s contention that the chemical didn’t pose a health risk to people. That included sponsoring a wide-ranging paper that, according to an email from one company executive, could cost more than $250,000 to produce.”

* “In one email, William Heydens, a Monsanto executive, weighed in on that option, suggesting Monsanto could cut costs by recruiting experts in some areas, but then “ghost write” parts of the paper. “An option would be to add Greim and Kier or Kirkland to have their names on the publication, but we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just sign their names so to speak. Recall this is how we handled Williams Kroes & Munro 2000,” Heydens wrote in an email.”

* “Another researcher mentioned in the email, David Kirkland, a genetic toxicologist based in Tadcaster, U.K., was a co-author on a 2016 paper with Williams and several others. That paper, which appeared in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology, reviewed the IARC findings and concluded the scientific research didn’t support claims that glyphosate posed a risk of genetic toxicity. He is adamant that the paper was not ghostwritten. “I’ve been in the field for 35 years. I’ve got a global reputation,” he told ScienceInsider. “I’m not about to try and compromise that by signing up to a paper that has been ghostwritten by someone else.”

* “Pearl Robertson, a New York City–based attorney representing some of the plaintiffs suing Monsanto, says the cozy relationship is part of a pattern marked by Monsanto trying to shape the science around glyphosate. She points to a 1999 email in which Heydens, the Monsanto executive, refers to whether the company should continue working with Dr. James Parry, a genetic toxicologist at the Swansea University in the United Kingdom, who has since died. “Let’s step back and look at what we are really trying to achieve here,” Heydens writes. “We want to find/develop someone who is comfortable with the genetox profile of glyphosate/Roundup and who can be influential with regulators and Scientific Outreach operations when genetox. issues arise. My read is that Parry is not currently such a person, and it would take quite some time and $$$/studies to get him there.” Taken together, Robertson says, the internal documents show how Monsanto “perpetually” tries to control “the science and scientific literature that is seen by the public as a whole and by regulatory agencies such as the [Environmental Protection Agency].”

* “Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, who has written about ghostwriting, says the practice has been an issue in other fields, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. Hiding the real authors of a paper is forbidden at most journals, he notes, adding that transparency “is what gives science its integrity. And when you violate that, there’s deception,” says Krimsky, a former chair of the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes Science). “The last thing we need in science in this day and age is deception.”

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